Ep #98: Horizontal Hostility and Anti-Coach Marketing

Welcome to the Make Money as a Life Coach® podcast, where sales expert and master coach Stacey Boehman teaches you how to make your first 2K, 20K, and 200K using her proven formula.

Hey, coaches welcome to episode 98. We’re almost to 100 episodes. Isn’t that fun. So excited. We are in the middle of the 200K Mastermind launch. I just did the call that we do, the info call. And today. I get to watch all the videos that everyone sent in. and it’s my favorite day. I just, like, get the tissues because I’m a crier.

Neil always makes fun of me for that, but I am a crier. I will cry. I just get so excited for everyone’s missions and, like, what they’ve accomplished and where they’re going. I just get so in it to help all the coaches.

So, after I record this podcast, I am going to get in my comfy clothes and get on the couch and curl up by the fire and get my tissues and just watch videos and cry for the rest of the day. I’m looking forward to it a lot.

And then, I’m going to get on a plane. I know some of y’all are terrified of this, but we’ve flown several times this year. And we’re going to get on a plane and I’m going to go to Austin, and I’m going to meet my mastermind for the first time in like a year. I don’t know how long it’s been. Maybe not a year. We met in January – okay, so the first time this year since January. It was a little dramatic.

So, the first time since the Caymans, I’m going to get to see my people in person. Not all of them, but some of them. And I’m so excited. So, I’m going to finish this launch. I’m also going to finish this huge project I’m working on for 2K. Stay tuned.

And then, I’m going to go celebrate with my mastermind peeps and my fiancé in Austin. And then, I’m going to come home and take it easy. I feel like I’ve worked so hard this year, in the best way. We have created more content than we’ve ever created ever before. And so, November and December are going to be winding down and getting ready for 2021. Are y’all ready? I’m ready. This next class of 200K is going to be off the charts amazing.

We had more people apply on day one than all of the last round. It was crazy. It just tells me how many coaches are out there making money. I’m here for it. Are you guys here for it? Alright, that’s enough with me, what’s going on with me. Let’s talk about you.

So, one of the things that we study in 200K Mastermind is the idea of thought leadership; becoming a leader of thought in our industry. And I really stepped into this idea when I was in master coach training. Like, I remember having the thought – I was in the shower and I remember having the thought, “I am a thought leader.” Like, I can think that now and that thought will help me create ideas into the world that make me a leader.

And I just started thinking it all the time, “I’m a thought leader.” And it really helped me create just the highest-level content in the last two years, the highest-level trainings, the highest-level programs, coach at my highest level. And when I say the highest level, it’s a little bit cliché. But I really do mean my absolute maximum potential that I didn’t even know existed.

And it also helped me make decisions that created an abundance of peace and calm in my home life, which was the most byproduct ever. And it has ultimately led me to contributing to this industry in a really powerful way with millions of dollars to prove for that, to be the measurement of that.

So, here’s what I want to do for you over the next several months – not back to back, but over the next several months – I want to share with you come concepts that I believe are vital for fostering your maximum potential, your highest level of thought leadership. I want to encourage you, with these episodes, to not bypass them because you feel like maybe you’re not even close enough to thinking about thought leadership, that you’re really just trying to figure out how to make money as a life coach.

Because a lot of what I teach you, it’s little behaviors that start now for you. They’re little shifts that will make you stand out against all the other coaches selling and will get you where you’re going and help you make money faster.

So, before we dive in today, I want to discourage you from thinking that the ideas I’m going to share with you in this episode and in future episodes, I’m going to discourage you from thinking that they’re not practical because I have made them practical. How you make something practical is by practicing it every single day and creating a better life because of it.

And my students are modeling these mindsets and behaviors and ideas so beautifully and capturing a big part of our market’s revenue because of it. So, this isn’t fluff. This is like the opposite of fluff. It’s radical, it’s hard, and it’s going to require you to constrain and exercise maturity and restraint, really exercise restraint and be totally committed to putting your mission and your purpose above everything else, no matter how enticing it feels and how gratifying it might feel to focus on something else.

So, today specifically, I want to talk to you about something that happens in our industry that devalues our industry, it truly devalues our own potential for thinking, and then therefore ourselves, and blocks access to our highest level of idea creation, and especially if you are a newer coach listening to this, your selling power. I’m actually going to talk to you today about how it affects your selling and your authority in this industry.

So, the concept that we’re going to talk about is called horizontal hostility. And really, how that shows up in our industry is anti-coach marketing. Now, I did not create this concept. I learned it from Adam Grant. And I’m going to give you my most basic interpretation of it that I think will be the most useful and easy to understand.

So, basically, horizontal hostility is founding groups that are otherwise similar in mission, it is an action members of the group take that drive each other apart and create animosity and lower the overall value of the effectiveness of the mission.

So, you get passionate people together and each passionate person decides there is a right way. And in doing that also, decide that there’s a wrong way and that everybody else is doing it wrong. So, the group ends up bickering with each other instead of joining together in their commonness to fight a mutual cause.

Now, the way this shows up, the way Adam talked about this was in – he actually used the example of two different not for profit groups, social justice groups, fighting for women’s suffrage long, long ago. So, Susan B.- Anthony had one group. I can’t remember what her foundation was called or what her group was called. And then another woman, Lucy Stone had one.

And so, they were fighting the same mission, but they had disagreements about how they should be fighting and the tactics they should be using. So, instead of getting more people together in the suffrage movement and helping women gain the right to vote, and instead of teaming up with other black people at the time who wanted to be able to vote, they fought against each other. And both causes lost out.

So, I want you to think about this. I find this a lot in – so for example, I feel like our 2K community is so amazing. 200K is so amazing. I’m part of a life coach school group. So amazing. But what happens is when you get maybe members of a particular coaching school and then another particular coaching school or coaching method and another coaching method, and I see this a lot on my ads where people will start coming on and be like, “Yeah but where are you accredited? And this is the only real accreditation and you shouldn’t even be coaching people.”

And they start arguing on my Facebook ads. That’s a great example of how that happens. But it’s like the coaching methods and groups start arguing and policing each other instead of banding together, learning from each other, and going out into the world to help more people.

So, I see this in the coaching industry a lot, unfortunately. And we have the opportunity to not fight against it, but just not engage in it at all. And I think it happens in the coaching industry not where you think and for the reason that you might think.

So, I think it shows up, first and foremost, in coaches selling, but because of how our brains operate, just the way our basic brain function is. Our brains like to focus on the problem and on what we don’t like, on the negative in every situation, on what might harm us, what might harm others.

Our brain wants to live here. Our brains are so addicted to the feeling of self-righteousness. And our brain gets a really big dopamine hit from the activity of policing others, of telling other people who to be, how to behave, what they should be teaching, what they shouldn’t be teaching. It gives us a sense of control and authority.

So, here’s what happens. Coaches marketing starts being this kind of anti-coach campaign. Let me tell you all the things wrong with the coaching industry and how I’m different and how I will fix it. And let me tell you about all these other coaches who are doing it wrong and whose methods don’t work and have deceived you. And then tell you how effective I am and how much better I am than those other coaches.

And now, this is just one way that horizontal hostility shows up. We’re going to talk about the other ways in just a second. But to me, at the most simplest, it’s just very lazy marketing.

Here’s why. When your brain can go there, to what other people are doing wrong and what you don’t like, and then you can present them as this horrible situation and then present them as a villain and you’re the victor. It’s so easy to do that. Our brains are just trained to do that.

It doesn’t have to think hard about explaining clearly what you do when you can just spend all your time discrediting what someone else does. And your only explanation of what you do can be that it isn’t what the people who are doing it wrong are doing. It’s lazy marketing.

And so, here’s what happens. You start your customer experience off with negativity. You start spreading the message that there are crooks – yes, I’m using that word. I’m like an 80-year-old man from the Midwest. There are crooks in this industry. And you start seeding the idea to yourself and to other people that there’s an opportunity, that it’s possible that people can be scammed if they work with these other people that are doing it wrong, that they can be taught the wrong thing, that they can be led astray. And that this could happen with them.

And if they aren’t scared away from you just by your marketing, from your anti-coach marketing, the other problem becomes they become codependent on you. So, when you do anti-coach marketing, they’re either scared away from you because it feels negative, or they become codependent on you. Neither of those are results we want for our people or ourselves.

This is something that happened to me so subtly in my first few years of coaching. One of my coaches was very subtly – I’m sure she didn’t even realize it – putting down other coaches and their methods and creating belief for me that I could not succeed and would not succeed without her and that I would never find a better coach.

I also had this happen to me in a romantic relationship. Before coaching, before I really understood these concepts at a mastery level – now, I don’t believe I could ever be manipulated or taught something that could harm me. But there was a time that I didn’t have coaching and I didn’t realize I had choice over thought, that I could take something or leave it.

And my boyfriend would always tell me that I would never find someone who loved me as much as he did. And after years of this, I believed him. And my family and friends would say this to me, “You’ll never find someone that loves you as much as him.” So, I stayed in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship for years thinking I would never find someone better.

This is emotional abuse. Be careful that you never do this to your clients, that you don’t subtly have the thought that you’re so amazing that they’ll never find a better coach than you or a better opportunity than you. It’s kind of like this idea of the savior complex. It’s like you really do think you’re doing a good thing. You’re like, “I’m helping the people and I’m the best person.”

It’s like using some of the things I teach against yourself and your people. I always teach in 2K, you might be the only opportunity someone has to change their life. That consult call that they’re on a call with right then and there with you, that might be their only moment where they consider investing in themselves and making a change. But we don’t use that to be like, “I’m the only person that could ever help them,” right? It’s like going to two polar opposites and it’s really not useful. Like, they can find a better coach than you.

Yep, I said it. It’s possible. There are better coaches maybe than me. I don’t choose that for my own self-belief, but I don’t see the idea that my coaches could never be successful without me because it’s not true.

They could go work with any of my 200K students and they would get amazing results. They could go work with any other coach. There are lots of amazing business coaches in the industry. So, I’m not the only one.

I always want my clients to know this idea, that they could be successful without me. I don’t want them to stay for fear that they can’t find better, for fear that I’m a lone ranger in the coaching industry and they’re and there are no other good coaches available. This is not the message that we want to send about our industry.

We don’t want to talk about our industry this way. This is what creates bad program PTSD. We will create a generation of clients who don’t take responsibility for their own results and blame the, quote unquote bad coach they had for them not getting the results that they wanted and that they were coming for no matter what.

Any time a coach reaches out to me and they’re trying to ask me about my program and then tell me about this coach they had that was completely terrible and awful, I never engage with that. In fact, I usually – one person said, “How do I know if this is going to be a good experience?” I’m paraphrasing, “How do I know if this is going to be a good experience. Recently, I had a really bad experience. I don’t know what I can trust. What do you think I should do?”

And I don’t usually respond to stuff like that anyways, but I happened to be on our business page and I responded, I’m like, “First, you should clean up the past coaching experience you had and take full ownership of why you didn’t get results and don’t let it be that that coach didn’t show up for you.”

Why didn’t you get the results? Start there. When you do that, if you take enough responsibility, you will no longer feel bad about that past relationship and that past experience. And you will know, you will have full confidence int his next one going forward because when you take full responsibility for your results, you know exactly what you’ll do differently next time. And there’s no fear and there’s no ambiguity.

That’s just a small example of stopping horizontal hostility in its tracks. Because could easily be like, “Those other coaches are the worst. Like, you really have to be careful with those coaches. Here’s why my program is different and better.”

I could do that, but it would be at the cost of the value and reputation of our entire industry, it would be at the effect of a generation of clients who experience life coaching and their overall experience of it. So, I actually recently – well, in June, when Florida opened up, Neil and I went to Miami. We always stay at the Four Seasons in Surfside. So, it’s not like Miami beach. It’s very secluded and amazing and wonderful and quiet. We always joke that we’re like 70-year-olds. We don’t like to party and we love quiet calm, want to be in bed at 10pm. So, we love this hotel. It’s very quiet.

Anyway, so we go to this hotel and we’re having dinner at the Surf Club, which is a Thomas Keller restaurant. He’s one of our favorite chefs. He has three restaurants in Yountville where we’re getting married. We’re obsessed with him. So, we always eat at the Surf Club.

So, we’re eating at the Surf Club and our waiter has worked with Thomas Keller for years and opened several restaurants with him. And he was talking to us about that experience. And he said that the one thing about Thomas Keller is that she’s obsessive about the way he talks about the restaurant industry.

In fact, he said that he doesn’t even call it the industry. He hates when people call it the industry. I don’t have a qualm with that. I think it’s fine that we call it the coaching industry. But he hates it. He calls it a profession. So, he’s always raising the value of what they do and who they are in how he is and the way that he talks about – he gave me a lot of examples. But just like the way he talks about – I can’t remember what they called the person that washes the dishes. It’s not the dishwasher. It’s, like, some really fancy term.

And every single thing to do with any Thomas Keller restaurant is just going to be like the terminology they use, the level of service they give, the care they put into their products, the ultimate highest to be the example, the ultimate example of the profession of food service. This is what we want to aim for; raising the value of ourselves, of other coaches, of our profession. And the way that we think, the way we behave, the way we interact with other clients, the way we interact with other coaches, the way that we sell.

And the only reason not to do that is you have a thought that other people are doing it wrong, that they can do it wrong, that coaches who do it wrong can harm people. Again, I don’t think this is – it’s never coming from this, like, I don’t think a malicious place.

It’s coming from this – it’s really more like a self-righteous place of I know best and I’m afraid other people are going to be harmed so I need to police this situation and make sure no one believes – this is how it used to come up for me, because this happened for me right at around the six-figure mark, where I would see other coaches marketing things that were against what I believed and I would be like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t want these people to pick up these beliefs. I don’t want people in the world to come and think this person is right. I don’t want them to pick that idea up. I’ve got to protect them.”

This is not useful. It’s not good. When you feel the need to protect people, you police what is being told to people and you step into horizontal hostility. You step into anti-coachness. And this is how this is a thought leadership principle. I want you to consider spending your time policing other coaches, telling the world how other coaches are doing it wrong, and I don’t care if it’s just a little bit of your time, because that’s what some people try to tell me, “It doesn’t take a lot of time. It’s just 20 minutes.” It doesn’t matter.

Any amount of time telling other people they’re doing it wrong, they’re thinking wrong, they’re teaching their people wrong, you can spend your time doing that. Or spend time creating concepts that further the advancement of our industry. Coaching your clients to the best of your ability.

You spend your time that would be spend policing making connections and serving people. Or creating things, creating content, you know, free content, paid content, thinking, just spending time thinking in a way that is a super-thinking, really high value thinking for your future. Spend 20 minutes doing that. Spend 20 minutes policing and see the difference in how it feels and what it creates.

It takes a lot to take the high road, to not give in to a good rant, to not get into the argument off on Facebook. It does. I get it. I have a few close friends who I trust with my life that if I can’t restrain myself in any way, I will sound off to.

When my brain is being human and I want to go in and police, we have a little text thread and I’ll send them my thought instead. But I don’t put it out into the world because I know they’re going to come back and tell me to do a thought download, which they recently told me to do.

They’re going to be like, “Do a thought download on that. Let’s coach on that. How can we make this more productive?” But I don’t put it out into the world. So, I’m not asking you to be, like, I don’t’ know what the word is, like above humanness. I’m not saying that you should never have these thoughts or that you should never feel very strongly about certain things. But be careful about what you’re putting out into the world and what you’re really spending your time doing.

Because my mission is to raise the value of the industry, I am helping coaches make money in. This is my industry. I take ownership over it. I Take ownership over the way I speak about it and how I speak to people in it and the way I sell it. I refuse to sell from either of these places; making other business coaches wrong so I can be right. And from the industry is tanking and I have the secret. Any kind of, like, negative-feeling marketing.

There’s a pretty big coach in the industry whose entire marketing scheme is the worst-case scenario. This is the first, other than the situation with my coach, the first situation where I really encountered horizontal hostility and started being like, “Wait a minute…” I don’t remember exactly what the article said. It was something like, “the coaching industry will be dead in just a few years. Only the top people are making money. Everyone else is going broke,” or something ridiculous.

And then, of course, I was like, “I have to have the answers.” And I felt so desperate and urgent. And then I got on the training and it felt so icky and scary. And I almost went down the tunnel of believing him, that the coaching industry was tanking and that pretty soon it would be obsolete and everybody would be out of a job. It was the craziest stuff and I was like, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”

And then, I pulled myself out and I remined myself that that marketing technique was meant to scare me into buying. We don’t need to scare clients to make money. We don’t have to put our industry down or other coaches down to make money.

I really want you to consider, if you ever have that urge, where it’s coming from. Does it feel good? Does it feel like the most valuable thing you could be doing? Does it further our industry? Does it advance our mutual cause? Because remember, horizontal hostility happens in a group with a mutual cause.

Now, we have the power of thought management, of directing our brains. We can direct them better than this to more valuable places. Again, Adam Grant talks about this and how it showed up with the women’s suffrage movement.

So, Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony fought against themselves for so long because they were doing it wrong. Susan thought that Lucy was doing it wrong. Lucy thought that Susan was doing it wrong. So, it took 27 more years after Lucy Stone’s death for women to gain the right to vote. 27 years, because of their addiction to self-righteousness and being right and policing and arguing amongst themselves.

It was painful to learn that. And yes, I am still learning things like this. I hate history. I know very little about history. I always joke with my friends but this is 100% true, you know how you have one dream that reoccurs a lot and you wake up sweating and you can’t sleep. So, I have the reoccurring dream that I didn’t graduate high school because I never showed up to history. That’s how much I hate it.

But I learned this in the context of business, so that’s how we’re here. So, your history lesson of the day from the worst historian on the planet. So, Lucy Stone took her first stand for women’s rights in 1855 and we finally gained the right to vote in 1920, 65 years. Is that right, the math? I’m going to say it is.

I want you to think about that. 65 years of not voting because of bickering, because of lack of constraint, because of an inability to come together for the same mission, because of self-righteousness, because of horizontal hostility.

Do we want to make the world wait to finally have emotional health because we can’t restrain our brain’s primal desire to focus on what isn’t working and what we don’t like, or what we disagree with? I definitely do not.

I made a strong stance that I will love. Love might be a big word. Let’s say I will like enough to not have drama about whoever becomes president here in the US. And because of what it frees my mind to do – people think that this is a diminishing of the severity of the issue. But this is how we get tricked into horizontal hostility.

We believe in the severity of the issue and we believe that first impulse to fight against it. And I’m not saying that’s even wrong. Some people make their entire lives out of fighting against it. But I haven’t. I’ve made my life to fight for emotional health and I want that to be the priority.

I can love someone or like someone and disagree with them. I want you to hear me say that again. I can love someone for myself, for my experience of it, and disagree with them.

And then this is the other thought error people have, is that we can only take action if we’re really angry. And I have learned to take action without being willed to do so by negative emotion.

I am a killer at getting shit done and creating results. I don’t need anger and hostility to do it. I am fueled, I am compelled by something far greater. Total connection to my mission. The things I can personally control and the most valuable ways that I can create change, the most effective ways for me personally.

So, this brings me to policing and arguing on Facebook. Dear god, please, if you are listening to this podcast and a student of mine, stop it. It reminds me of the Bob Newhart skit, “Stop it right now or I will bury you in a box.” If you haven’t seen that skit, it’s so good. Just look up Bob Newhart, I will bury you in a box.

Or the Steve Carrell moment from the Office where he’s like, Toby I think comes back from vacation and he’s like, “No, please god, no.” That’s how I feel about it. Stop it.

It’s the least valuable thing you can do with your brain for this industry. And the reason is, it doesn’t change anyone’s mind to argue with them publicly, on their thread or yours. And it will only make you look bad and them look bad. Even if you are right, the moment you start arguing on a thread, you immediately lose authority.

Why do some people hate Trump? Among many reasons, one is he’s always on freaking Twitter, tweeting shit, arguing. Among other things. That’s the most basic one, right? Like, the commentary is that it isn’t presidential. It makes our country look bad.

And listen, I have a lot of friends and family on both sides. And even most of the Trump supporters that I know say the tweeting is out of control and that they would agree that it hurts his cause more than it helps. The same is true for coaching. It doesn’t look professional. And once you are a coach, you are a coach all of the time. That’s the way I think about it. I’m always a coach, even on my private Facebook page. I’m representing the industry.

How do you want to represent it? With hostility, self-righteousness, judgment? Or constrained focus on service, professionalism, and creating lasting value? Listen, if you want to argue on Facebook and debate, fine. It is your business. But at least consider not doing it with other coaches.

Notice the horizontal hostility. I want you to consider, with other life coaches – just start there – that we are on the same side. When we don’t team up and support each other and only focus on moving the industry forward in the highest regard, we are setting our industry back years. We are keeping people from getting help for years. We are creating mistrust in our industry, the one we want to be in for years to come.

One thing that has been said over and over and over from my students in the 2K community recently is how our community is not representative of social media in a good way. They can’t believe the love and care and value they get in our group.

I made it that way. I ask everyone in our community to treat it like a community full of their clients. What would it look like if you treated your public page in this way? Like, every person you interact with is your client and you are their coach and you’re on the same side. And your job isn’t to tell them how to behave or think and it isn’t to put them down or call them out or tell them they’re wrong.

What if you couldn’t ever sell with hostility. Meaning you couldn’t put something or someone else down at all to sell? If you couldn’t use fear to sell? What if you couldn’t use things that you don’t like to sell? What would have to happen is you would have to then only focus on your client’s problem and the solution you offer. And you would have to come up with ways to believe that you are the best and your method is superior without putting someone else’s down.

What if you couldn’t find a villain to introduce in your marketing? You would have to focus your brain on you, on how to articulate your offer and make it look good without putting it next to something that looks bad, so it looks better in comparison. The result would end up looking something similar to mine. The amount of value created by you will be astonishing. The level of your selling will be far above average. And you will feel a we are in this together vibe, instead of a we’re fighting amongst ourselves vibe.

Seriously, sometimes we lie to ourselves about how something really feels. Make sure you check in. And you know what? While I’m focusing and constraining my brain and staying out of horizontal hostility, I’m also having more time and more money to pour into social changes I care deeply about. I can do more than argue with someone on Facebook.

I can meet with organizational founders and see how I can help. I can donate lots of money that I’ve made by staying focused on my mission. I can take the most effective action at the highest level.

Now, I’m not saying never talk about negative things or be positive Polly. Here, I’m teaching on this right here. Talking about what doesn’t work and why and how to fix it. But I’m not doing it in someone else’s Facebook thread. And I’m going to offer it here once. And I’m going to model it always. And then I’m going to go on to create more things.

I recently saw coaches arguing on a thread and putting each other’s teachings down and trying to disprove each other’s teachings and pick it apart. And it went on for hours.

I was going into my Facebook community a few times a day as we were getting apps to look people up and see their engagement. And this thread just kept popping up in my news feed. And this went on throughout the day. And while these coaches were arguing and discrediting and disproving each other and trashing each other’s method or whatever you want to call it. In their mind, I don’t think it was trashing. It was more like disproving or discrediting.

But while they were doing that, in the same amount of time, I wrote a podcast, recorded three new content modules for my program, recorded a podcast, taught my 200K Mastermind, and took my dog for a walk. We claim we don’t have time, but really, the hostility is just taking all of our time.

Okay, so I want to leave you with thoughts I think about our industry and coaches that lead me to not engage with hostility the most often. The first one is, it’s impossible for a coach to harm someone, no matter what they teach or say. Even the coach that taught me subtly and, I’m sure subconsciously to mistrust other coaches, it was a profound lesson for how I wanted to be in the industry.

It taught me so much about how I wanted to show up for my clients. Like, I actually remember encouraging my friends, the Lindseys to seek out other coaches when I stopped offering one on one. I wanted them to not be dependent on me, thinking I was the only one that could ever help them. And I maintained our friendship well beyond our working relationship.

So, I want you to think about, when you have the thought that they could possibly harm someone. I want you to think, so what? Even if a coach teaches a client some uninvestigated shadow shit that they haven’t dealt with that’s a limiting belief, the client still has the power to make that a positive for themselves. It’s truly impossible for us to harm someone. That thought really serves me. It doesn’t make me reckless or unthoughtful when it comes to caring for my clients. But it does take the hostility and the desire to police what other coaches are teaching people on the internet. And it doesn’t have me marketing against them

The other thought I have is we are all capable. Last year, or some time recently – it’s all running together now in the pandemic – I had a coach message me about drama she was having. She wanted to join my 200K mastermind but she was also planning on working with one of my 200K students in her group until it started. But because we enroll months in advance, we couldn’t join both at the same time.

And we had this great discussion and I told her that she can work with me whenever she wants. But she can also stay with my client who is equally capable. New coaches, yes, they’re capable of getting clients transformation, even if they don’t understand all the concepts with mastery yet, even if they are wrong about some things. Someone could talk to a lamppost every week and get transformation.

The third one is we are all doing what we believe is best for our clients, always. Even my coach, early on. She has made a tremendous impact in this industry. She’s helped a lot of people. There is no right way.

This one really helps me stay out of the strategy versus mindset war that happens with some coaches. I’m like, “It’s both, people. It’s both.” Neither right or wrong, but it could be an and situation. And I don’t need to make anyone wrong for believing it’s strategy 100% or it’s mindset 100% or it’s both. It doesn’t matter. No one needs to be wrong.

I don’t need to put strategy coaches who coach on the A-line down to make thought work seem more effective. I can just focus on how to make my coaching effective. The war is unnecessary.

The other thought I have is, this is the best profession in the world. Another one is we are all just getting started. There is no such thing as oversaturation in the life coaching industry. And a lot of this, like, horizontal hostility happens from lack.

How many people do you know that have a life coach? I don’t know anyone in my personal life that has one. It hasn’t become mainstream yet. And that’s the best news. We all have an opportunity. We don’t need to hoard the clients and get them all to come over to our side.

Another thought I have is we all are the innovators of this industry. I recently adopted this one. My client Simone recently compared the beginnings of psychology and psychotherapists, how they all started doing psychotherapy on each other in the beginning before it became mainstream. And that that’s now where we’re at with life coaching, that all of us, we are the pioneers. And that in 50 years, maybe life coaches will be like physical trainers or therapists today, where it’s socially acceptable and everybody has one and everybody talks about one. And I love thinking about we’re the pioneers and we’re the innovators and we’re still making so much money.

The need for coaching has never been higher and will only continue to grow. And there’s plenty of room for all of us. There are plenty of clients.

And my favorite one is, I have so much to learn. It’s a very different thought than, “They have so much to learn.” Our greatest contribution can be bringing coaches together, lifting our industry up and connecting to further the same mission we all have.

I can’t win this war alone. I need all of my allies. So, I don’t want to discredit a single one. Alright, coaches, look out for the horizontal hostility restrain yourself. Fuel that into higher, more effective thinking Sell only yourself on why you are the best coach without comparison. And treat the world and every interaction you have, especially on social media, as if they were all your clients.

And I’ll leave you with this. If you think this sounds diminishing or that it can never work or it’s fluff or it will never have a bigger impact, that this can’t have a bigger impact than the policing and the arguing and the discrediting other coaches, I want to offer for you to try it for 30 days.

We had to do this for master coach training. We had to get off social media. We had to get off the news. They were like, “You have to protect your brain. It’s your biggest asset. You have to protect your thoughts. You have to protect what you allow into your brain, the amount of other people’s thoughts you let into your brain.” I’m going to do another podcast about that.

But we had to protect the asset and use that time to focus on creating value and becoming more valuable. And I’m telling you, I’ve never looked back. There has never been a greater thing I’ve done for myself. So, if you think that this is like fluff, I don’t even know, I want you to just consider, for 30 days, trying it, letting go of the hostility, letting go of the policing, letting go of thinking other coaches could be doing it wrong, they’re selling wrong, they’re harming their clients. Let all of it go and just focus on you and your brain and your biggest asset and creating value and thinking at your highest level. Just 30 days. That’s all I’m asking. And then, let’s have a conversation about it. Alright, I’ll talk to you next week.

Hey, if you’re ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2k for 2k program where you’re going to make your first $2,000 the hardest part using my simple 5 step formula for getting consults and closing new clients. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.